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Five words that changed America

Five words that changed America

Jamelle Bouie writes: There is a moment for every American when she first encounters the Declaration of Independence. For most, it comes to her as scripture — the highest and most sacred text in the nation’s civic religion, encapsulated by its moving assertion of human equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of…

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White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted

White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted

The Associated Press reports: A White House report brands the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, especially at the National Museum of American History, as radical activists who cannot be trusted, indicating that President Donald Trump may be preparing to install his own team. The report released late on Independence Day by the White House Domestic Policy Council comes in the midst of Trump’s aggressive campaign to overhaul some of Washington’s most sacred cultural and historic institutions. Trump in March revealed…

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‘Trump is cultural heroin,’ J.D. Vance once warned

‘Trump is cultural heroin,’ J.D. Vance once warned

Yesterday, Peter Wehner wrote: Ten years ago today, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood. The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of…

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Nearly a million investors lost a total of $3.8 billion on Trump’s crappy crypto coin

Nearly a million investors lost a total of $3.8 billion on Trump’s crappy crypto coin

The New York Times reports: An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad. Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a…

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What Ukrainian war widows know about love and loss

What Ukrainian war widows know about love and loss

Julie Reshe writes: ‘I died along with him in Huliaipole.’ This is how Tetiana Vatsenko-Bondareva, a Ukrainian widow, describes the day her husband was killed on the battlefield. ‘At first, you don’t understand anything – just an abyss, no time, no space, nothing at all. There is just some kind of existence,’ explained another war widow, Oleksandra Kolestyk. I first heard these words as figures of speech, the language of grief stretching beyond the limits of ordinary expression. Little did…

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One sleazy president called another to intervene on behalf of a classy goalscorer

One sleazy president called another to intervene on behalf of a classy goalscorer

The New York Times reports: President Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, on Wednesday and asked him to review the suspension of the United States’ top goal scorer in the World Cup, Folarin Balogun, after he was given a red card in the team’s match that night against Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to three people familiar with the conversation. On Sunday, FIFA reversed the suspension, announcing that Mr. Balogun would be eligible to play Monday against Belgium. The…

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Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

The Guardian reports: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency. Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk…

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Kleptocracy is Trump’s most lucrative business venture

Kleptocracy is Trump’s most lucrative business venture

Timothy Noah writes: Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered…

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The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

Nicholas Kristof writes: Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine. “Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week. I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said…

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Technofascist Peter Thiel warns: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’

Technofascist Peter Thiel warns: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’

CNN reports: Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence and the West on Tuesday, accusing Pope Leo XIV of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for AI regulation. In his remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, he also warned of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the United States’ Democratic Party. Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, was an early supporter of President Donald…

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Gasoline shortages in wartime Russia evoke memories of the Soviet Union

Gasoline shortages in wartime Russia evoke memories of the Soviet Union

The New York Times reports: Alyona Sadovnikova first experienced gasoline shortages in mid-June, when she pulled into a station and was told it was only serving customers who had ration coupons. “I was horrified: Are we in the Soviet Union now where you had to get coupons to buy sausage?” she said in a telephone interview. Just a few days later, Ms. Sadovnikova found herself waiting 18 hours to fill up in the city of Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, almost…

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Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

Traditional dancers perform in front of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, celebrating the Buddhist festival of Esala Perahera, in Kandy, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 8, 2025. Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images By Eranda Jayawickreme, Wake Forest University I grew up in Sri Lanka. Much of my adolescence was spent in Kandy, a city built around a lake, set amid the lush tea plantations of the hill country. Its northern shore houses the Temple of the Tooth, one of…

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Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

Jay Bennett writes: When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came…

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The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

Media Matters for America reports: Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China. The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify…

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